Struggling between AMD or Intel system.I've been working with Mac system for the last 3 years and want to have some change. (that MacPro belongs to my boss and I just went in to his office and kicked his @ss so now I need a new computer to work for me ONLY)

Looking at both Intel i7 3770 or the AMD FX-8150.I'm going to run both PS CS6 and LR4 (and maybe some AI and ID, but not alot) on this machine with Canon EOS 6D RAW files. I do mostly product and family shot so I don't think I'll send in more than 400 RAW files each time.

If I use Intel, I'll go for H77 chipsetIf I go for AMD, I'll use FX990 chipset

Either one or the other, I'll fit in with 16GB RAM, Radeon 6570 2GB DDR3, 250GB SSD and bunch or HDDs. (NO OVERCLOCK)

OK, so what do you guys think?Physically 8 cores @ 3.6Ghz but 125W and 32nm transistor tech (AMD)or4 Cores with HT @ 3.4Ghz but only 77W and 22nm transistor tech (Intel)

When I was building a new PC for LR4/CS6, my kid who works in IT said the higher number of AMD cores would not translate into performance gains for reasons I did not fully understand. Which makes this a pretty useless reply, I'm afraid.

I have always been an Intel man myself and I will tell you, Intel is the best there is. BUT AMD is significantly cheaper. Looking at my own setup which is now nearly 3 years old, I intend to build a new system. This time I am going AMD. The performance is not quite equal of course, but the difference is not worth the extra cost of the Intel. Unless of course you were going to do 3D Animation or hardcore gaming. But for what you need it for, an 8 Core AMD cpu would be just fine. Their graphics cards are also plenty powerful and you can always get two or three or four cards and connect them together!

The i7 is faster than anything from AMD in many benchmarks. If you're looking at AMD I would consider the newer 8350 over the 8150, it's a better chip. In some cases the 8 core AMD is faster than the 3770, usually in certain heavily threaded applications like rendering or video encoding, but it's usually just barely faster. Even in multi-threaded applications the i7 is often faster, depends on the program. Single threaded tasks the i7 is universally quicker, sometimes by a large margin.

In short, the i7 is faster at almost everything, sometimes by large margins. When the AMD 8350 occassionally wins a benchmark, it's not by much.

Is the i7 worth the price premium? You certainly don't get a 50% performance increase for for a 50% price increase. Either one will perform admirably.

Here's a photoshop bench from a well respected tech site. The whole review is worth a read.

I really like the H77 chipset - great performance, efficient power utilization. You are really hitting a sweet spot with the Core i7-3770. You might consider deferring the graphics card purchase and see if the HD4000 graphics will suit you

One warning; make sure the motherboard you order has it's BIOS updated for Ivy Bridge! Otherwise, you may have to borrow a Sandy Bridge CPU to update.....

You should consider how much you rely on PS versus LR and what things you do that are processor dependent. I just did a new computer build for myself and opted for the Ivy Bridge i5 processor rather than the i7 since I don't use PS all that much. Full details on my build are here. I have had some bad luck with Radeon GPUs and opted for Ninvidia this time. I'm quite happy with my build and it's stone cold quiet which is also important.

I was using AMD CPUs for over 10 years. At this point I am running i7 3930K and could not be happier. Don't struggle, just get this CPU!I went with 3930K to support 64GB ram and use 12 hardware threads (6 cores). FYI, some other models i7 models had limitation for 32GB ram.I am not planing to upgrade this CPU for a number of years - easily. It is reasonable to expect that going forward GPU will be utilized by software at much greater extent.Therefore more effective future upgrades will be for GPU. Just get the best i7 you can afford and it will work cool and fast for you!

If you're into Adobe applications and planning to stay there, an Nvidia video card might be appropriate. Premiere is optimized for that card family, so presumably that could be extended to other Adobe apps as well. But bottom line, don't skimp on ram for a fancy CPU.

I've noticed that the Beta of LR5 is quite multi-threaded when building Smart Previews, which is very CPU-intensive. In a case like that, the 8350 could do quite well. I've built a system based on an 8350 for a client and she is very satisfied using it with Lightroom.